Author
Topic: Yet another MythTV question. (Read 4606 times)

First off, the MythTV integration in 1.1 seems to be working much better than the 1.0 release. Thanks a ton. Was the root cause of the problem identified or is the current implementation still a work around? I noticed that mythfrontend is called mythfrontend.real which looks very similar to the workaround identified by user Corwin in this thread "Any solutions for disappearing mythtv frontend?"

Now to my question, after selecting Media->TV it launches the myth frontend and takes you to live TV. If you traverse back to the LMCE home screen you see a list of options including (liveTV, recordings, guide, etc.). When you press "guide" it takes you to the mythTV guide. In the infamous LMCE debut video that wasn't the guide that was displayed. That guide allowed you flip through "2 weeks worth of shows" in a few minutes or something like that. This clearly isn't the guide that was displayed in the video. Whatever happened to that guide? I as hoping to see it in the 1.1 release. It looked nifty and I hope it gets revived. The current mythtv guide is fine, but it takes away from the media centric experience that LMCE is shooting for.

Now to my question, after selecting Media->TV it launches the myth frontend and takes you to live TV. If you traverse back to the LMCE home screen you see a list of options including (liveTV, recordings, guide, etc.). When you press "guide" it takes you to the mythTV guide. In the infamous LMCE debut video that wasn't the guide that was displayed. That guide allowed you flip through "2 weeks worth of shows" in a few minutes or something like that. This clearly isn't the guide that was displayed in the video. Whatever happened to that guide? I as hoping to see it in the 1.1 release. It looked nifty and I hope it gets revived. The current mythtv guide is fine, but it takes away from the media centric experience that LMCE is shooting for.

I think that you need to select UI1 or UI2 with alpha blending for that to be available... I may have that wrong but I think that is the case.

I see. You were referring to the "tumbling" browser that's available when you select media->videos. That does indeed work as advertised. I was expecting to see a similar "tumbling view" for the program guide and recorded shows after you've started watching TV. Instead we get directed the generic MythTV guide and recording screens.

There is a method to get to a tumbling menu for TV listings. It is referred to as the absolute function of the left action button on the gyro mouse. I use it all of the time, but I do not know if you can get to this menu with out the gyro mouse.

In LiveTV continue to hold the left action button and the screen tumbling menu on the left hand side of the screen will pop up. Then you will use the gyro mouse to scroll through the listing quickly. I have had some occasional problems with it sometimes being empty, and other times it has the data. I have never really tried to figure out why this is the case.

Is anyone able to get smooth HD playback using the MythFrontend? This is driving me insane. I'm able to playback 1080i 30Mbs HD clips using xine just fine. If I try to watch a 1080i or 720p broadcast using my ATSC capture card I get sluggish playback and what appears to be macroblocking. My CPU utilization is at ~50% using xv and my signal strength is in the 90's. It's the same behavior whether I launch mythfrontend from inside LMCE or from the KDE desktop. I'm at a loss. I'd be curious to hear if anyone else has HD playback working with Kubuntu 7.04 and mythTV?

I am not sure about the cause of sluggish playback - but can you take a look at /var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages to see if there are any errors from drivers during playback.

I'll check those logs. My guess is that I may be running into a PCI latency issue. The main clue is that I can playback a known good HD video clip just fine, but I can't playback one that I've recorded. I don't think that playback is the problem. I'll bet the HD video isn't being captured properly. According to the link below, the IDE controller needs to have a higher latency setting than the video capture device. I don't have a problem recording SD content because the bitrate is much lower than HD. With HD, the capture card has to continually dump data to the drive. If the IDE latency is set to low, it might not be able to keep up. That could explain why my recorded shows are very choppy. They clearly have missing frames. I'm hoping that's my problem. I'll try to investigate it this week.